Friday, April 3, 2015

Characters You've Never Heard Of: CLEMENTINE (and my COVER blurb!)

They went in and ordered from menus that looked like they were drawn in crayon by three-year-olds. Their food came on chipped, mismatched dishes, and they ate off of a table that had one leg an inch shorter than the other three. But that was why Clementine loved it, because it was different, and it was weird, and it was special. This, coincidentally, was also exactly why Isaac loved Clementine. She was possessed of a chaotic energy and passion he had never encountered in anyone else in his life. No two days had ever been alike in all the years they had known each other, and no moment he could recall had ever been boring. She was a primal force of nature, mercurial and ever-changing. Not every moment was fun and happy—do not think for a second that everything was perfect. They had fights and arguments that shook the walls, and smashed dishes and sent the poor cat scrambling to hide under the sink. But they also had moments of screaming, child-like joy and passionate, philosophical debates, and wild, toe-curling sex that was even louder than their arguments. They did everything in their lives with their knobs on eleven (well, Clem was always on eleven, Isaac was lucky when he got past seven and a half) but that was why he loved her, because he knew that without her energy in his life he would be a boring and miserable nobody, and the last twenty years would have been an utter and complete waste.

Clementine is one of the main characters in Ten Thousand Days. She's the love interest of the protagonist, and the driving force behind the main conflict and thrust of the story. I don't want to get into it much more than that and risk spoiling anything, so today's post is going to be even more lame than usual.

To (hopefully) make up for it, I'll give you some back story. The name "Clementine" is one my wife and I have tossed around for years, and we always said it would be our first daughter's name. Well, we had our daughter on March 13, and of course we didn't name her Clementine. In fact, her name is one of the reasons/excuses I've been dragging my feet about releasing Ten Thousand Days. I wanted to be 100% sure we didn't call her Clementine before I went ahead and left her name in the book.

I guess I could have just changed the name of the character, but that would have cost me my excuse for procrastinating...

But the time for procrastinating is over. I really, really, want to get this book out there in the very near future. The manuscript has been pretty much done for ages, but there's still some periphery bits to work out. A big one is the blurb.

So here it is ladies and gentlemen, the extra bonus from today's blog post, YOUR opportunity to tell me how badly this blurb sucks, and if you would buy a book based on these few meandering words:

***

They say love hurts and time heals all wounds, but sometimes the reverse is also true.

Isaac was very good at wasting time. Video games, a mindless job, no responsibilities - he had a simple life and few wants and, despite being hopelessly average, unassuming and kind of useless, had somehow miraculously married the most beautiful and wonderful woman in the world.

He had no idea how good he had it, until it was all taken away.

Time does not like being wasted. It is mercurial, inexorable and carries a wicked grudge. And sometimes, just sometimes, it enjoys playing games with people's lives. To be perfectly honest, Time is a bit of a jerk.

Isaac had never learned to appreciate what little time he had, and now he must travel to the ends of the universe and face unspeakable evils in a cat-and-mouse game with Father Time himself for the slim chance to win back a few fleeting seconds of happiness. The price of failure? Only the end of all existence.

Ten Thousand Days is a fairy tale set in the modern day, a fantastic journey of desperate love and horror with a twisted sense of humour. It's a story of what a young man will do for love, and it's not always pretty...

***

So what do you think? Needs work, huh?

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